Stitch (12 page)

23. Reconciliation

Grabbing Alessa’s shoulders once more, Janie beseeched Alessa to be cautious.  “Less, we’re almost out of time, so I’m going to emphasize once more how
critical
it is that you don’t let on that you know
any
of this.”

Alessa had never seen Janie look so frightened.  She still couldn’t process most of what Janie had said, so she just nodded quickly in response.

“Say it.  Promise me you’ll be careful.”  The reflection of a hundred tiny screens glowed eerily in Janie’s wide eyes.

Shaken by Janie’s frenzy, Alessa stuttered, “I… I promise.  I won’t let anyone know.”

Janie dropped her hands from Alessa’s shoulders with a visible sigh.  “Just remember that if you’re not careful, we’ll both end up like Nikhil.”

“Like Nikhil?”  Alessa remembered the night they almost kissed, watching those security officers drag him away into the dark.  She whispered hesitantly, “What happened to him?”

“He was the star of another show that they’re filming on campus, but his show wasn’t supposed to intersect with yours.  So the producers had him taken away…”  She shook her head.  “I honestly don’t know what they did with him.  No one has seen him since.”

Alessa gasped quietly.  Her stomach felt queasy as she realized that the violent tussle she’d seen really
had
been her fault.

Janie grabbed Alessa’s hand.  “I know what you’re thinking, and it’s not your fault.  None of us could have known.”  She paused, her eyes clouding, then continued slowly, “Well… maybe
I
could have, but I didn’t know about him meeting you until the night of the party.  I thought the producers were introducing a love triangle – I never imagined he was from another show until I learned what happened from my contact a couple days later.”

Janie’s reassurances made Alessa feel slightly better, but not entirely.  She wasn’t even sure if she could
believe
everything that Janie had revealed, but regardless, she suddenly felt petrified.  Maybe she hadn’t been living the
happiest
life for the past year – or however long she’d been part of this charade – but she
had
at least felt physically secure.  Alessa would never have guessed that her seemingly normal everyday life was so fraught with danger, that one misstep could end it all.  She felt on edge, and then she realized with a start that the feeling was all too familiar.

“Janie, how long have I been here?”

“On the set?  Since the start of the semester – all of your memories before that are fake.  But you were being held prisoner for months before that, over a year actually.”

Alessa rubbed her eyes with her hands, willing herself to wake up from this nightmare.  She didn’t.

Janie tried to reassure her.  “I know it’s a lot to process.  I’m sorry.  And I’m sorry for my behavior the past few days.  It’s just that, I didn’t realize that time travel was the plotline the producers had in mind – I thought it was too out there – and then when I suggested it to you, I unwittingly set you on that path and fast-tracked the story.  I knew that when you finally reunited with Isaac, the show would be over and we’d lose our best chance at getting you both out.  So I was just freaking out.  I hadn’t been able to get in touch with my contact and I thought I was going to lose you.  But it’s okay now, we’re working out the plan.”

As Janie finished, one of the monitors flashed back to life – students milling around the cafeteria.  Then another, and another, their pace accelerating.  Janie swore.

“Okay, you have to go,
now
.  We’ve been in here for a couple minutes, so you can’t just reappear in the same spot you were when the cameras went off.”  Janie snapped her fingers rapidly as she assembled a quick plan in her head.  “Oh!  Got it – run over to the stairs and walk down them as if you had gone up to your room one last time before going to class.  That should account for your whereabouts during the blackout.”

Alessa nodded, her heart railing against her rib cage.  She wasn’t ready for this yet.

The screens were popping back on at a rate of two or three per second now, and Janie was visibly panicked.  She turned Alessa around and pushed her towards the door.  “I’m sorry, it’s time.  We’ll talk again soon.  Just remember your promise and
act normal
in the meantime.  Okay?  You can do this.”

She opened the door with one hand, the other on Alessa’s back, the room flashing with each resurrection of a camera.  “Oh, and Less?  One more thing.  I love you.”  And Alessa felt herself shoved from behind back into the hallway of Z-E-Pi.

The sunlight filling the hall was blinding after the dimness of the security closet.  Alessa could feel the adrenaline surging through her body; she knew what she had to do.  Feeling her way along the wall, she ran as quickly as she could to the foyer and halfway up the stairs.  Grasping the rail, she took a couple deep breaths to steady herself, then turned around and began descending.  She hoped she’d made it in time.

As she exited the sorority house and briskly made her way down the path toward the quad, Alessa suspected that she hadn’t given the producers any reason to be suspicious.  Even the security guards she passed didn’t give her a second look.

As her heart rate began to slow, Alessa was able to dismiss the threat of immediate danger and try to wrap her head around Janie’s revelations.  Her mind was reeling.  A thousand questions popped into her brain in rapid succession, each thought raising another before she could even begin to ponder the answers.

Trying to remain calm and maintain a normal walking pace, Alessa shook the myriad ambiguities from her mind.  Now that she could
think
instead of just reacting, she focused her thoughts on one question: what evidence could she find to support Janie’s radical claims?

Glancing around, Alessa reasoned that everything looked pretty normal – students bundled up in the cold hurrying to and fro, a maintenance worker raking leaves into a pile.  The ivy-covered walls, the professors in their tattered tweed jackets, the mousy little librarian and her dusty old tomes…

Come to think of it, maybe everything was a little
too
normal.

Then there were the cameras, of course.  The university’s claim that they were for security wasn’t
completely
unreasonable, though the fact that they were apparently hidden even in Alessa’s bedroom did point towards there being something unseemly going on.  And the monitors in that closet were certainly more advanced than anything Alessa had ever seen.  Even if such technology
did
exist today, she couldn’t imagine the school budgeting
that much
money for fancy equipment when regular old flatscreens would have done just fine.

And then there was the closet itself.  Alessa had walked down that hallway in Z-E-Pi countless times and never
once
noticed a doorway there.  And once she finally did see it, it wasn’t like it was cleverly hidden or anything.  Yes, it was the same color as the wall, but the outline of a door was plain to see.  It felt almost as if she had been wearing fogged up glasses without realizing it, and then the fog was wiped away and she could finally see clearly.  She wondered what else she had missed.

Entering the econ building, she looked around the lobby and noticed another hidden door similar to the one in her house.  She stood in place for a few moments, pretending to fiddle with something in her bag, and casually watched the other students filing into the building.  Not a single one seemed to notice the door, or anything else around them for that matter – they all just walked straight to class, their eyes fixed on their destination.  Were they acting?  Alessa remembered what Janie had said – “We’re all prisoners here.”  Had Alessa been wandering around in the same daze as everyone else?

Alessa thought back over her experiences.  Were there red flags that she should have caught?  It did seem odd that Isaac and Alessa only ever saw each other.  If he really was a ghost, why hadn’t anyone else ever seen him?  Or if their house really was stuck in some sort of time warp, shouldn’t everyone who lived there be affected at some point?  Why hadn’t she seen any of Isaac’s other family members or, for that matter, anyone else who had ever been there before or after Isaac’s or Alessa’s times?

And what about the more bizarre claims that Janie had made, for example about all of Alessa’s memories before ESU being constructed?  Losing her parents felt so real that Alessa couldn’t imagine those memories being artificially implanted in her.  It was pure agony to know that her family was gone, an almost physical pain.  But then again, why didn’t she have a single photo of her parents?  Janie had said something about the memory wipe – the “stitch” she called it – not being able to erase certain feelings, and also that they had lost their – Janie and Alessa’s – true family.  Maybe the feelings were real then, and her memory had just been altered to apply those feelings to a different circumstance?

If that was true, though, did that really mean that Janie was her
sister
?  They did look somewhat alike, she supposed.  By no means twins, but they shared the same dark hair and sharp features, and Alessa had always
felt
like she’d known Janie forever, even though they supposedly only met a few months ago…

It suddenly hit Alessa that she didn’t even know Janie’s last name.  In months of conversations and emails and shared classes, it had somehow never come up, and Alessa had never thought to ask.  She felt that familiar foggy feeling, the thought beginning to slip away almost as soon as it had occurred.

Quickly, Alessa pulled out her notebook and jotted “Janie’s name” in the corner of a sheet.  Tearing the page from the book, she marched into her econ lecture, taking a seat toward the back of the class.

As she unzipped her backpack, Alessa had the frustrating feeling that she’d forgotten something.  She strained to remember what it was.  Homework?  No, she was certain she’d done the reading…  Did she bring her laptop?  Yes, there it was in her bag…

And then Alessa noticed the crumpled piece of paper that she was clutching in her hand.  Unfolding it, she saw her own writing in the upper right corner – “Janie’s name.”  Alessa shook off the fog once more as her line of thought came flooding back.  She didn’t know Janie’s last name.

Before she lost the thought again, she opened her laptop and navigated to the student directory.  Searching for Janie, only one listing came up:

Khole, Janie.  Freshman.  33 Mason Manor (Zeta Epsilon Pi), Rm. 2E

Alessa’s head swam as she quickly closed her browser and shoved the paper to the bottom of her bag, hoping no one had noticed what she’d been doing.

So it was true.  Janie was her sister.  Something clicked in Alessa’s mind, and she knew she wasn’t going to lose that fact again.

Alessa wondered why the producers would take the risk of listing Janie’s real name in the directory.  She remembered Janie explaining that the stitch couldn’t separate a person from key facts about themself, like their name.  Alessa supposed that if she had looked herself up and saw a different last name in the directory, she would have immediately recognized that something was wrong.  So given that the producers thought Janie was stitched as well, it made sense that they wouldn’t try to change it.  And until today, their selective perception technology had worked like a charm to hide these little inconsistencies – it seemed as though anything that caused dissonance in Alessa’s mind would be forgotten the moment after she recognized it.

Alessa calmly turned her notebook to a new page and began taking notes on her professor’s lecture.  But inside, her mind was racing and her emotions swelled.  She teetered between biting fear and the blackest despair.

If Alessa had had any doubts that what Janie had said was true, her jarring discoveries since leaving the security closet had quelled them completely.  How much time had Alessa lost to the producers’ games?

ESU was most definitely
not
the idyllic collegiate environment she thought she’d been inhabiting.  Far from it.

Yes, it appeared that Alessa had stumbled upon some fantastically twisted kind of hell.

24. Recollection

Alessa slid her tray onto the long table in front of her and squeezed onto the bench, smiling at the handsome young man across from her.  He flashed his bright blue eyes and returned her grin.

“Hey, Joe.”  Tossing her hair behind her shoulders, she threw back a long sip of milk and released a satisfied sigh.  “How’s your day going?”

Joe swallowed a bite of his apple.  “Not so bad.  I’m on landscaping duty, so I’ve been enjoying this weather.”

Alessa wished she’d been assigned landscaping as well.  Butterflies wheeled in her stomach at the thought of being able to spend the day side by side with Joe, not to mention that it was a gorgeous summer day, sunny and warm but blessed with unusually low humidity.  As it was, she was stuck inside on kitchen cleanup.

Joe took a tentative look around and leaned in, whispering conspiratorially.  “So, have you given any thought to joining me tonight?”

Alarmed by Joe’s indiscretion, Alessa glanced up and down the long bench checking to see if anyone else was looking.  They were all clad in the same dull cotton jumpsuit as Alessa and Joe, slowly eating their lunch and making idle chitchat.  Alessa noticed with envy that the hot food today was fettuccini alfredo.  She was tempted to steal a bite, but then she noticed the glazed look on her neighbor’s face as the drugs in the food took hold.  Scowling at her undressed salad, sometimes Alessa wished she could just forget what she knew about the colony.

Ever since the day she’d gotten ill a few weeks ago, Alessa had been careful not to eat anything rich which could hide the bitter taste of the drugs.  She still wasn’t sure exactly when – or why – Paragon had started drugging the food, but when she’d recovered from her sickness, her mind had felt clear and sharp for the first time in months.  After 24 hours of not being able to keep anything down, her system had finally cleared the drugs and she’d been determined to keep it that way ever since.

Alessa’s alarm had grown when she returned to her work shifts and noticed the zombie-like behavior of her younger sister, Janie, and her best friend, Joe.  Being under the influence of the drugs herself, she hadn’t discerned the change in her loved ones until she could think with some clarity.  Once she realized what was going on, Alessa had covertly steered them away from the items she suspected contained drugs, and after a few days, they’d begun to return to their normal selves.

Since then, they’d been subsisting mainly on produce and nuts, which was difficult since the colony’s communal dining halls served only a limited supply of fresh fruits and veggies.  Mercifully, it seemed that the milk was left untainted, so that had provided them with a consistent and nutritious source of calories.  But even so, Alessa and her friends were quickly dropping weight.

It still wasn’t clear to Alessa what exactly the point of the drugs might be.  As far as she could tell, Paragon was an orderly and peaceful society, everyone contributing to their share of the work and, in turn, provided with everything they needed to live a comfortable life.  It had certainly been a relief from the chaos they’d been plunged into before the colony – after the constant threat of nuclear war and then the pandemic that had killed almost everyone she knew, including her and Janie’s parents and kid brother, Paragon had been a sanctuary.

Alessa still wasn’t sure how she and Janie had survived the devastating outbreak, some mutated strain of a fast-acting plague that seemed to viciously chew up its victims from the inside out.  No one even knew how it had all started – whether it was a biological attack from one of their enemies in the Eastern Allies, or just some sort of horrible mistake at a lab.  But regardless, the disease had spread rapidly and it had been merciless.

Alessa’s family had spent weeks barricaded in their home, watching friends and neighbors fall sick one by one.  When the government finally announced a safe quarantine area, they had carefully traveled there together, only to be separated at the gate.  Coughing and wheezing, the condition of Alessa’s parents and brother betrayed to the guards that they had contracted the virus en route.  As a result, only Alessa and Janie would be allowed inside.  The sisters despaired at leaving their loved ones behind, but their parents had insisted that they continue on to safety, promising to find them once their ailments were cured.  They never saw their family again.

Alessa had been only 17 at the time, Janie 14, and the two of them clung together in their new home as the outbreak continued to ravage the population beyond the quarantine zone.  Eventually communication with the outside world was lost – as far as they knew inside the quarantine area, no one outside was spared and it probably wouldn’t be safe to leave within their lifetime.  A temporary government was established to keep order and they named their new home Paragon.  Paragon was supposed to have been a beacon of equality, a community where everyone shared the labor and cared for each other and worked together towards a common goal: survival.

At first the idea seemed to have been working.  Yes, there were sacrifices – limited food, the bland but functional government-issue jumpsuits, grueling menial labor assignments that everyone had to endure.  But in return, they were safe.  And Alessa and Janie at least had each other.

Being in the same age group, Alessa, Janie, Joe, and Joe’s brother Isaac were all assigned to the same “efficiency unit” – the complex where they slept, worked, ate and socialized.  As orphaned teenagers looking after their younger siblings, Alessa and Joe had become fast friends, bonding over the burden they shared and prodding each other with amusing banter to lighten the load.  Before long, Alessa very much hoped that they would someday become
more
than friends, but she hadn’t yet had the courage to express those feelings.

And so despite everything that had happened, Alessa had been doing okay.  After a few years in Paragon, she had adjusted to her new life and had fallen into a comfortable routine.  Each day she received her work assignment, reported for meals when they were served, and spent her free time with Janie and Joe, watching the engrossing TV dramas that aired in the evenings.  She had even been happy.  And then she’d discovered the drugs.

Now Alessa was more scared than anything.  She suspected she was breaking some sort of protocol by not ingesting the mind-altering substances, but at the same time, she wasn’t even sure who she should be hiding from.  As an egalitarian society, there were no clear authority figures in Paragon.  Obviously
someone
was in charge, making the decisions about who lives where and does what jobs, and also apparently what drugs go in the food.  But Alessa didn’t know who that was, and some instinct told her it would be a bad idea to start asking too many questions.

Worse, Alessa wasn’t even sure when the drugging had begun.  Her sense of time was skewed, one day running into the next with only the passing of the seasons to break up the year.  It was easier now that her mind was free, and she knew it’d only been a month or so since she’d stopped taking the drugs.  But she wasn’t sure how much time had passed before then.  It could have been months, or it could have been years.

After weaning Janie and Joe off the drugs, Joe had been the first to notice that there were a handful of other people eating a similar diet in the cafeterias, dishing the hot entrée onto their plate and pushing it around to make it look like they’d eaten it, but never taking a bite.  He’d cautiously mentioned his observation to one of them, and shortly after he’d received a covert invitation to a secret meeting with some sort of underground organization.  He was to meet with them for the first time that night, and he’d been urging Alessa to join him.

“Alessa.”

Joe’s voice snapped Alessa back to the present.

“What do you think?  Are you going to come with me?”

She looked down at her plate.  “I don’t know… It just seems kind of risky.”  Joe had always been the more daring of the two – it was something Alessa found appealing about him, since boldness was a quality she lacked.  She couldn’t even work up the nerve to tell Joe how she felt about him, let alone sneak out of her bunk in the middle of the night.

“Don’t you want to know why this –” Joe motioned at their dazed dining hall companions “– is happening?”

“Of course I do,” Alessa hissed.  She continued under her breath.  “But you don’t even know who these people are.  How do you know you can trust them?  You’re putting yourself in danger.”

Joe sat back, resigned.  “Fine.  I understand your concerns, but if I don’t take this opportunity, we may never know what’s going on.  I’ve got to try.”

Alessa sighed and shoveled a forkful of dry lettuce into her mouth.  At the very least, maybe these rebels might have more insight into exactly which food was drugged so that she could resume eating something other than salad.

“All right,” she groaned through her teeth.  “I’m in.”

Later that evening, Alessa was lying in bed in the pitch dark, the soft sounds of her dozing bunkmates wafting around her.  Alessa glanced in the direction of her sister, but couldn’t make out her face in the dim light.  She hadn’t told Janie what she was planning for fear that she would want to come along, so she’d waited until Janie had fallen asleep then pulled out the clothes hidden under the bed and dressed silently in the dark.  Now she was just waiting for Joe to show up.

A quiet tap on the open window signaled his arrival.  Luckily, Alessa was bunked on the ground floor and the windows were all propped open due to the heat, so sneaking out wasn’t as complicated as she had anticipated.  She simply slipped out the window and followed Joe across the compound’s dark courtyard to an unmarked door in the alley between two buildings.

Inside, Alessa and Joe found a group of six people scattered about a supply room, some perched on boxes while others leaned against the dusty walls.  The man Joe had reached out to in the cafeteria was present, along with a few other individuals that Alessa recognized from around the compound, plus one tall striking blond about Alessa’s age whom she’d never seen before.  All of them seemed to be waiting for a signal from a middle-aged woman with cropped dark blond hair who sat rigidly in the sole chair in the room.  Alessa thought she looked familiar as well.

Alessa and Joe awkwardly shifted their weight and looked around, afraid to be the first to speak.  Then finally, the woman stood up from her chair and addressed the group, “Thank you, everyone, for joining us this evening.  Carlos, would you put out a seat for our newcomers?”

A sturdy Latino man in his thirties who’d been standing near the door crossed the room to pluck a storage container from a shelf and gently placed it beside Alessa and Joe.  When Alessa tried to adjust the angle of the box with her foot, she was surprised to find that it was so heavy that she couldn’t get it to budge.  She left it alone and sat down, but Joe remained standing.

The woman continued.  “Before we can go any further, we need to know who you are and how you found out about us.”

Joe cleared his throat.  “I’m Joe and this is Alessa.”  Alessa waved tentatively, feeling intimidated.  “A few weeks ago, Alessa came down with a mild virus which left her unable to eat for about 24 hours.  In that time, the effects of the drugs in the food wore off, and she realized what was going on.  She got her sister and me off the drugs, then I did the same for my brother.  Since then we’ve been eating a restricted diet, and when I noticed him –” he pointed at the man he had approached in the cafeteria “– doing the same, I mentioned it to him and well, here we are.”

Studying Alessa with a slightly alarmed expression on her face, the woman demanded, “Did you go to the infirmary when you were sick?”

The atmosphere turned tense as they waited for Alessa to answer.  “N-no,” she stuttered.  “I –” she looked down at her hands, ashamed.  “I was afraid it might be, you know,
the
virus, so I just hid out in the bunk.  I was too scared to tell anyone.”

There was a collective release in the room.  “I apologize for the interrogation.  I was worried you might have attracted notice during your illness, in which case they might still be following you – we can’t be too safe, you understand.”

The thought of being tailed for the past month sent shivers down Alessa’s spine.  She didn’t think that kind of thing happened in Paragon.

Joe took half a step forward.  “Listen, we just want to understand what’s going on.  Why are they putting stuff in the food and when did it start? 
Who
is doing it?  And how did this whole secret organization come about?”

“All in good time.  First, I believe introductions are in order.  We are the inner circle of the Rebel Alliance.  My name is Regina Green.”

No wonder she looked familiar – before the outbreak, Regina Green was the CEO of one of the largest media companies in the world.  Alessa had seen her face on television and magazine covers, but certainly never expected to meet the woman herself.  In person she looked much older than Alessa remembered, with more gray hair than she had first noticed; maybe Paragon just had that effect on people.

“This is my daughter, Elizabeth.”  The voluptuous young blond stepped forward, the shapeless standard-issue jumpsuit somehow perfectly hugging her svelte body.

“Call me Lizzie,” she said.  Alessa noted with a pang of envy that she addressed her remark to Joe, who hadn’t been able to peel his eyes off her.

Regina briskly continued.  “You’ve already met Carlos.  He’s a former police commander and head of our underground militia.”  Carlos nodded.